The Young Ones (1982—84)
It's a programme for young adults, made by young adults, and concentratin' on all the subjects that young adults are into! Like, unemployment!
TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.
‘80s ‘Alternative Comedy’ sitcom about a group of students: People’s Poet Rik, depressed hippie Neil, homicidal medical student Vyvyan, and Mike Thecoolperson. They share a house in which they variously host parties, bands, terrorists and demons. They also flood it, strike oil in it, burn it down and blow it up. They are mostly, however, bored. To quote the programme write-up in the Radio Times: ‘a video head helically scans the high coercivity medium, taking full advantage of the inherent wide hysteresic characteristics and fully saturating the magnetic structure of the oxide emulsion with predictably hilarious results.’
Who’s Your Friend?
The Good Life (1975—78) was the model of the classic BBC sitcom on which Generation X was reared. Tom Good (Richard Briers) quits his job designing plastic toys for breakfast cereal and with his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendall) sets about converting their suburban house in Surbiton into a commune-style self-sufficient farm. And with a goat in the back garden and a cockerel called Lenin, you can just imagine the hilarious scrapes they get into with their uptight petit bourgeois neighbours, Jerry and Margot Leadbetter. And…
VYVYAN
No! No! We’re not watching The bloody Good Life! I hate it! It's so bloody nice! Felicity 'Treacle' Kendal and Richard 'Sugar-Flavoured Snot' Briers! What do they do now?! Chocolate-bloody-button ads, that's what! They're nothing but a couple of reactionary stereotypes, confirming the myth that everyone in Britain is a lovable middle-class eccentric. And I! Hate! Them!
Vyvyan’s sentiments are encapsulated in the Series 2 episode ‘Sick’, in which the opening titles of The Good Life start playing only for Vyvyan to rip right through the screen, screaming with rage.
It sums up The Young Ones perfectly. There’s the ‘80s media-savvy culture-jamming of including another show’s credit sequence in yours. There’s the unconventional visuals of Vyvyan ripping through the screen, and the comic-book extremity of his violence. ‘Right on’ politics are juxtaposed with playground language. And above all there’s a very clear and unambiguous message that The Young Ones is not The Good Life.
Like Vyvyan, The Young Ones tore the conventional sitcom apart. To begin with, it eschewed conventional farce plotlines. In ‘Flood’ (Series One), the house is cut off by a flood, forcing the house mates to resort to cannibalism. Then their landlord accidentally drinks the ‘homicidal axe-wielding maniac’ potion Vyvyan has made and the only way they can dispose of him is to lure him into Mike’s bedroom, which has a lion tamer and all his lions in it.
But even within that loopy and unpredictable plot, the show continues to fracture and distort: there’s a mediaeval witch trial in the garden, puppet vegetables dancing in the sink, and Vyvyan discovering Narnia inside the wardrobe in the hallway. The Young Ones didn’t only subvert the safe and dependable sitcom format with strange language and violent action. It also fundamentally atomised its structure.
Written by Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer, The Young Ones came out of the early ‘80s Alternative Comedy scene, and featured many of the stars of the new stand-up clubs. Mayall, Ade Edmonson, Nigel Planer and Alexei Sayle played starring roles, but there were also bit parts for Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Robbie Coltrane, Lenny Henry and countless others. Watching it now prompts a lot of rewinding to see if that really was Paul Merton as a mediaeval peasant (yes it was).
Alternative Comedy was a radical departure from cosy and conventional mainstream sitcoms; but, more importantly, it was also a radical departure from the lazy, habitually bigoted and bullying tropes of the traditional stand up-circuit, a boozy round of creaking old racial stereotypes and ‘take my wife’ cliches. It was comedy’s punk moment: instinctively young and left wing, but even more instinctively rebellious and anti-authoritarian.
This is frequently played for laughs. Rik Mayall’s Rick is a self-appointed rebel who writes terrible performance poetry, uses the insult ‘fascist’ with all the fervour and meaninglessness of a Twitter poster, and reverts to petit-bourgeois prissiness in the face of any actual threat. But the anti-authoritarian stance also meant something. It was all very adolescent; but that made it immensely appealing to actual adolescents, assuming they were allowed to stay up and watch it.
How did you meet?
This is where I confess that I didn’t actually see the first series of The Young Ones at the time. I was at boarding school, and even if we had been allowed to watch television on week nights, the chances of me persuading the assembled Meatheads and Fauntleroys to watch punk comedy on BBC Two were not high. Instead, my parents watched it and, every week, my mother sent me a hand-written recap in a letter. They did not do this on sufferance; as far as I can tell, they thought it was brilliant and that I needed to know about it. So much for rebellious and anti-authoritarian.
Because, of course, while The Young Ones might have been an alternative to mainstream sitcoms and bargain basement entertainers, it was firmly within other comedy traditions. It owed more than a little to the Oxbridge alumni of The Goodies and Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Beyond The Fringe; indeed, Terry Jones made an appearance in the Series Two episode ‘Nasty’. It feels significant, though, that Alexei Sayle refused to be on set with Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson in the Series Two episode ‘Bambi’ because they had been in the Cambridge University Footlights. You didn’t get people making that kind of gesture in Monty Python.
More directly, with its mixture of daft jokes, cartoon slapstick, nonsense non-sequiturs and freeform approach to plotting, it can often feel like an ‘80s updating of The Goon Show or even the Marx Brothers (with Christopher Ryan’s Mike as the Zeppo Marx of the group).
Indeed, it was even more traditional that might have first appeared; it had to be made as a ‘variety’ programme rather than a conventional comedy in order to get the kind of budget the producers wanted. This has the pleasing side-effect of episodes being interspersed with performances by a sequence of ‘80s acts including Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Madness, The Damned and Madness.
You could even argue that in Mike, Neil, Rik and Vyv, you have the fundamental family dynamic of laid back Dad, busy Mum, good Daughter and naughty Son that powers sitcoms from The Good Life (Jerry, Margot, Barbara, Tom) to Cheers (Sam, Diane, Coach, Carla) to The Simpsons (you get it).
Are you still friends?
And here is where I confess that when I finally sat down to watch all of the first series for this rewatch, I found it somewhat hard work. It was lovely to see Rik Mayall again with his ridiculous face, obviously, and its somewhat shambolic nature is charming; but the pacing is all off, the scripts are flabby and few of the jokes land. It was noticeable that most of the bits I remember and still quote are from Series 2, in which the scripts are tighter, the performances more confident and the budgets larger.
Parts of it are still funny, but none of it feels revolutionary any more. This is inevitable, and not just because that revolution had a profound effect and changed television comedy forever. Revolution is context-specific: it is defined by that against which it revolts. Alternative comedy was defined by the mainstream that it aimed to disrupt. The Young Ones, in trying to not be The Good Life, is entirely dependent on The Good Life for its definition.
Out of that context it is not only no-longer-revolutionary; it is incomprehensible. The shock depends on norms that have long gone; the subversion depends on conventions no one observes any more. All you’re left with is some shouting and a bunch of indecipherable cultural references.
But, of course, it did have a profound effect. Most obviously, it launched careers, and not only for its onscreen stars. Writer Ben Elton became the host of Friday Night Live, which in turn provided a platform for a whole new generation of comedians, including many of those in the background of The Young Ones. Many of these people — French and Saunders, Lenny Henry, Ben Elton himself — are now national treasures.
The Young Ones also changed the sitcom fundamentally, and opened up the possibilities of what the form could achieve. Elton’s next project was Blackadder with Richard Curtis, which is brilliant but tends to a more conventional shape; but there were other shows that picked up that idea that a sitcom could be freeform, inventive and weird: the Flann O’Brien loopiness of Father Ted (1995—98); Edgar Wright’s movie pastiches in Spaced (1999—2001); the handmade strangeness of The Mighty Boosh (2004—07); the musical interludes of Flight of the Conchords (2007—09). These were all sitcoms made by people who presumably had not been to boarding school, and who were allowed to stay up and watch The Young Ones.
Who were you in the show?
Most crucially, of course, what The Young Ones gave me was a guidebook on how to be a student. I wasn’t a student in 1982. I was a schoolboy. Scumbag College was still seven years in my future. But when I got there, I knew precisely how to act: messy and obnoxious, self-absorbed and opinionated, drunk and bored, like Neil, Vyvyan, Mike and Rick.
Another wonky sitcom no doubt influenced by The Young Ones was Matthew Holness’s Garth Marenghi’s Rick Dagless’s Darkplace (stay with us, it will all make sense if you read this piece):
Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
Radio might be the most intimate medium but TV is the most sociable; a convivial presence in every living room we’ve ever known, ready with gossip, information, comfort or distraction. In The Friend in the Corner we return to significant TV shows to find out what they did for us, and how they pulled it off.
With the benefit of hindsight, the most true to life student in the show might have been Mike. The older postgrad seminar sex pest is a familiar figure in the HE sector
The nearest successor I can think of is Black Books, though it has an actual woman in it, who is not there for light relief or to discipline the boys. Amazing.